Saturday, August 29, 2009

smallest Nomad crew member disappears

I'm missing Moko. We haven't seen him since last week when we were tied to the dock. Did he hear the call of the wild and jump ship? We were hearing other geckos chirping in the palm trees at night. Maybe he heard them too and followed their voices.

In other news, it was not 50 bananas in that bunch we received, it was over 150!! I have since given away almost 80 bananas but they keep ripening too quickly for us to eat them all. However, I'm now beginning the process of drying them-I slice them long and very thin and then lay them in the sun or (as is the case now) when there's rain and overcast skies, I put them in the oven on a low setting for a long time. Fortunately they are only about 3-4 inches long and getting smaller the closer they get to the top of the stalk. The top banana is only 1 inch long.

In the next few days we will leave for the one day journey to Maupiti, a rural island and the last of our French Polynesian stops. From there, we will depart for Fiji with a possible stopover in Western Samoa.

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Thursday, August 27, 2009

surf pics




Brian on his "paddle board/windsurfer"
Another wave from Teahupoo
The M10 is repaired after it broke at Vairao. The local pearl farm workers were very interested.

pics on Raiatea


Tuesday, August 25, 2009

free bananas and more

It sure was a treat to hop off the boat and walk the 50 yards to the grocery store. Had yummy pizza from a pizza truck and took a great hike with an incredible view, went to church and got groceries and gas and hung out on internet for a few hours. It was civilization! :) After our two nights on the free dock at Uturoa we left "civilization" for Baie Faaroa. There was a river flowing into the head of the bay that we dinghied up. We passed were pretty much covered by shade all the way up, it was so thick with green growing things. Pretty. We stopped at the public botanical garden with a dock in the river. There was no signage, we just were told how to recognize it by other cruisers. At the garden, a local named James met us at the falling down dinghy dock and started showing us around and telling us the names of the plants and giving us things to smell and look at, some weird round purple and green fruit called canela that has sweet pulpy white insides to eat. When I ate it I had to ignore the way the flesh reminded me of ripping out a living organ from a purple skinned animal. We smelled the fragrant lime green strings that grow on the oolang oolang tree. We received a free vanilla bean, and a flower that looked like a purple speckled balloon with a probiscus. Then, he chopped down a whole banana tree and gave us about 50 bananas. Next he rowed down the river ahead of us in his kayak and stopped on the side to climb a palm tree and retrieve for us 3 green coconuts, which he husked. He wanted nothing for it.
This morning we dinghied down a few bays to the Marae Taputapuatea. Here's how the guidebooks describe it, "The Taputapuatea archaeological area held great importance to ancient Polynesians. When constructing new marae on neighboring islands, a stone from Taputapuatea had to be used in the making of the new temple...." This temple was also the staging grounds for the ancient Tahitian explorers that ROWED and sailed to New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Marquesas. Rumor also has it that Captain Cook was present at a human sacrifice, held in his honor, at this marae. Allegedly he was offered the victim's right eye (usually reserved for the priests) to eat, and he swallowed it. I figure, if this is true, he was just grateful he wasn't the one on the chopping block. Today, the place didn't look quite so ominous.
After we returned to Nomad, we pulled anchor and for the first time in a long time, SAILED (instead of motoring everywhere) around the north end of the island, hooked up on a mooring ball and hope to find a welder nearby. We are near a good surf break where Brian has already enjoyed two sessions.

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Sunday, August 23, 2009

Sunday

I went to the local protestant church which was conducted in Tahitian and has a cappella congregational singing interspersed throughout the service. It makes me want to get to heaven right away. The harmonizing that lifts and lulls, the echoes on the high vaulted ceiling painted the color of the summer sky, the strange tongue put me right at the throne of God with the full congregation of the saints. I imagined I was standing next to Grandma Krake. Brian came about 10 minutes before the service ended. He'd been surfing and came when he got back. He got to hear 2 songs and the Lords Prayer (we think that's what it was) spoken by the whole crowd.
After church walked around the marina and kept spotting old plastic kayaks and old windsurfers. Brian has been trying to buy one since last year in Mexico. We saw two in a pile covered with an old sail and asked a kid about it. He was French but spoke enough English to tell us the yellow one was for sale. We bought it off his dad for 5000 Pcf's. Brian paddled it back to the boat, quite happy. Now we have a "kayak" and a paddle board and a windsurf board for whenever Brian can find a new mast to replace the one that snapped while it was being our fill-in whisker pole.

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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Postcard Perfect

Yup, we're anchored in the ultimate South Seas postcard photo. Twenty feet of clear turquoise water and sand below us. The water changes color about 30 yards away to a color I can't describe very well. It's a pale pale creamy green over white sand surrounding two small palm covered motus, one of which has palm thatched cottages on pilings over the water. In the distance behind the tops of the palms, stand the peaks of Bora Bora. In between the two motus is a snorkeler's paradise. It's called the Coral Garden. Coral heads in purples, maroons, lavenders, yellows and whites. Fish in stripes, spots, solids of velvet black, neon blue, silver, butter yellow, maroon, and canary yellow flutter and fly around, ducking into crevasses or staring snorkelers cross-eyed they get so close.

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Saturday, August 15, 2009

boat bound

It's been blowing hard for the last 3 days and the next two are supposed to blow even harder. Makes the anchorages a wee bit less relaxing because the boat swings and if you're near anyone, they swing toward you and maybe slide a little bit closer. The rigging alternately sounds like someone banging on a door, someone playing the same three musical notes over and over, or a ghoul screaming on Halloween night. Because it was a little less windy yesterday than any other time in the next 3 days, we left Huahine yesterday and sailed to Raiatea, 20 miles away. I was nauseous about 80% of the time, so Brian did all the work. Just as we arrived at the pass into Raiatea's lagoon, a lovely squall blew over with pelting rain adding to the 20ish knots of wind. Luckily, it is a well-marked, deep pass with no breaking waves so we went on in and into the less rolly but equally windy lagoon. Now, we say Raiatea (pronounced rye-uh-tay-uh) but it actually is two separate islands, Raiatea and Tahaa, enclosed by one coral reef with about 2 miles of lagoon and reef in between the two. We're anchored all alone in on the West coast of Tahaa, the north island, in Hurepeti Bay. These two islands produce 70% of the Tahitian vanilla. When we walked around this morning we saw these distinctive orchids being cultivated in many pockets of the forests and in large shaded green houses in peoples' yards (next to the canoes and the headstones). We hope to take a tour of a vanilla farm and a pearl farm (also quite prevalent here) some time before we leave.

So all this wind has us feeling quite boat bound. The surf is all blown out, and snorkeling or swimming is no fun with so much chop. Inviting people over is not so great because everyone wants to be tucked on their boats doing anchor watch before it gets dark. So, we've had movie night two nights in a row and tonight. Today, Brian has proposed a "dress up" night just for something different to do. I guess I'll go see if any of my nice clothes aren't too moldy to wear!

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Teahupoo wave


Photo taken by Vaughan, a cruiser we met

Huahine



Yesterday, (August 11) we rented bikes in the afternoon with our friends off of Mainly, Dan and Joan. We rented for a 24 hour period so we had half of yesterday and the morning of today. It was a good arrangement because none of us has ridden a bike recently. Let me tell you, if the scenery and company hadn’t been as great as they were, the saddle pain would have mitigated the enjoyment. As it was, we had a great time riding the circumference of Huahini Nui, seeing beautiful bays, vanilla crops, ancient stone fish traps, ruins of maraes, and “sacred, blue-eyed, fresh water eels”. Everywhere you look on the island, you see green. Off of the island are the blues and turquoises of the lagoons inside of the coral reef.
Huahini is actually two islands inside of one coral reef. They are connected by a 50 foot bridge over the shallow water between. Legend has it that the warrior, Hiro, split the island in two by paddling his canoe into the middle and breaking it apart. He must have been very large and strong because there’s some tall mountains and a lot of volcanic rocks in the soil.
What I like about Huahine is there are no large resorts to be seen. Small “pensions” and cottages serve the tourists. It is relaxing and feels like the island belongs to the locals and we are their visitors. In Tahiti, it’s more as if tourism owns the island and the locals serve tourism. I wish we had more time here and on Raiatea, the next island over. There are many bays and ancient sites to explore but not much time left on our visas. We need to depart for Tonga by the end of August.

Impressions of Polynesia

A naked man just drove his chartered catamaran through our crowded anchorage. It’s a wild world here in the South Pacific; next we’ll see natives chanting while paddling their outrigger canoes out to sea. Actually, that last scenario has been a daily occurrence (often without the chanting). We have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of outriggers since arriving in the Society islands. There were a few in the Marquesas and Tuomotus but alongside 9 out of 10 houses, there is a canoe shed with up to 4 outrigger canoes in it. There are many handmade ones with tree limbs for the outrigger, but most are similar to the sleek fiberglass models the canoe club in Santa Cruz uses. Canoe building and small boat building using molds and fiberglass are well-known skills here. From about 2 in the afternoon until the sky is dark at 6:30pm, paddlers criss-cross the lagoons with powerful shoulders and rhythmic motions. There’s cultural pride in this sport as testified to the proliferation of va’a (outrigger) T-shirts, bumper stickers, and tattoos.
These crafts have been part of Polynesian culture for centuries. In fact, I learned today at the museum we visited, that one type of sacred building found at the ancient maraes (or central sacred stone platforms) was specifically for war canoes that could have been up to 55 meters long. These canoes also had outriggers, and some were built out of buoyant reeds instead of hollowed logs.

Another frequent structure at the maraes in centureies past, were roofed shrines for dead bodies. This is similar to a practice I’ve observed in the Society islands. They build small houses or roof over the gravesites of their family members. One of my first impressions of Papeete, the largest city in French Polynesia was wondering what it was I could see through the binoculars as we approached the main pass. What looked from a distance like an acre or two of wooden craft stalls with triangle roofs turned out to be the cemetery. The funny thing is that most people don’t seem to be interred in cemeteries, they’re buried in the family backyard. So, there’s the canoe rack and Granny’s burial shed in most of the tidily raked yards we look in to. I’ve seen up to six headstones in one yard. My favorite appeared to be a mound of sand under a clump of coconut palms. Fresh bouquets were at the foot and head and sides of the mound, and a hammock hung between two of the palms. No shed had been built yet.

Monday, August 10, 2009

busy 24 hours in Moorea

Saturday afternoon we re-anchored by motoring out of Cook's Bay and west 1 mile to the entrance of Oponuha Bay. As we pulled in, we saw Banyan, a boat we know with 3 California surfers all in their 20s. So, we anchored next to them. The anchor wasn't even fully set when they hollered over to have us come later that night for drinks and snacks on their boat. No problem, we'd had a quiet couple of days previous and were craving socializing. We ended up having some great conversations and then saw that our boats were rotating toward each other, and about to collide. This has never happened before. The situation was that Banyan was in shallow water without much scope on their anchor chain while Nomad was in deep water with a lot of scope on her anchor chain. Instead of fighting the inevitable, we rafted up when Nomad came alongside. Fenders were placed in between the boats and ropes attached between our bows and sterns. This allowed us to easily invite them all (the numbers had swollen due to the arrival of two French nurses) at about 11pm to the hamburger barbecue we had planned for ourselves for earlier in the night.

The next morning, Brian and I went in search of the rumored location of a place to swim with manta rays. On our way we saw and spoke with John Neal and Amanda Swan Neal aboard Mahina Tiana. They are well-known cruisers (we took a seminar from them at one of the Oakland Boat Shows) and were very friendly and gave us good advice. We arrived at the sting ray location just as a tour boat disgorged its 30 passengers into the chest deep turquoise water. They were sprinkling shrimp parts around and the rays were flying in between people eating and not minding being touched at all. The largest we saw was about 4 feet in diameter and the rest were around 3 feet. They all had tails that were straight and stiff, up to 4 feet long. I got to touch some delightfully slippery wings and swim a foot or two above others while looking them in their top mounted eyeballs while the gills below the eyes opened and shut. They are incredibly agile and graceful and strong. The feeding also attracted about 10 black-tipped reef sharks, some of which were about 4 1/2 feet long. It was a good thing for my fear of sharks to be around them and realize that they just want to eat small things, not attack me. Many times they glided by within a foot of my legs looking for tidbits of the fish parts the tour guides were flinging out for them.

After the ray-feeding session, we tried to find the location of the underwater tikis. I'd read about them and wanted to see them. Apparently, when the missionaries were here in the early 1800s they were making the people all destroy their stone and wood tikis. A few people went out into the lagoon and dropped their stone tikis into the water to hide them from the missionaries. The tikis are still there. I saw pictures of them and hoped to find them. Alas, I snorkeled all around their reported location and saw only coral and beautiful reef fish.

When we returned from this excursion, it was time to un-raft the two boats and get Nomad ready to leave for her overnight journey to Huahine.

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Moorea to Huahine

Ia Orana, (Hello)
Our boat friends picked us up from the boat today to have a look-see in Fare, the town we're now anchored in front of. We arrived here this morning after our overnight passage from Moorea. Joan and Dan were already anchored here and offered to drive their dinghy since ours is still tied onto the front deck. A downpour started just as we pulled away from Nomad. OOPS gotta go back to close the hatches and hide from the 5-minute gusher. We made it to the dock and the first store before the next sky bucket was turned over on us. After that one we spent the 10 minutes to do a circuit through the small town in the fierce sun.
Huahine is known for having been the central location of most Polynesian maritime excursions, and having the most revered marae (native temple) back in that same time period of hundreds of years ago. Nowadays it's known to have a few very very good waves for surfing, and some very intense protective local surfers, unwilling to share "their" wave. Up to this point, the Polynesians have been exactly the opposite of that about waves. Brian has been greeted with handslapping and smiled at in the line ups. When the swell hits, tomorrow, he'll find out how accurate the rumors are about this place.

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Friday, August 7, 2009

Moorea

Cook's Bay on the island of Moorea is one of my favorite places so far. It's got a small grocery store at the head of the bay, lots of places to go ashore and explore, massive spired cliff walls rising from both sides and a beautiful hilly valley rolling up from behind the grocery store. The spires catch clouds on their tips like my dog Sugar's white fur used to get left behind on the brambles she walked through. It is far less inhabited here than Tahiti, diesel fumes don't fill the air like in the anchorage there. The water is quiet and deep and the bay is uncrowded.

It's been one week since Brian's butt cheek pile-drived into the reef at Vairao. It has a dramatic bruise the size of a medium orange, solid Concord Grape colored, and still swollen. His skeleton is still sorting itself out as new aches radiate from the spine area. But he's back to only Ibuprofen and no more Vicodin. Still no surfing for a few more days, though.

My family is all in Grant's Pass, Oregon camping along the river without me. This is a difficult thing. I still feel the loss of on-going family visits and friends' lives going on without me. On the other hand, in 5 months, we'll return to Santa Cruz to rejoin that life for a while. I'm sure I'll miss the cruising life when I get home. So, we're trying to relish these last few months of exploration, knowing that we will most likely never come this way again. I'm thankful to have family and friends to miss, and thankful to have islands still ahead to see, islanders still to meet.

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Monday, August 3, 2009

Sunday and Monday

Sunday, August 2
I went to a local church today. Every single woman was wearing a hat. It's like in the Southern Black churches. Most of the hats are woven decorated with elaborate flowers made out of the same straw as the hats. I understood one word during the whole service, "maruuru" which means thank you. It was entirely in Tahitian, not french. Even so, I understood the spirit and the beauty of the music. At the end, a man came up to me and started speaking French. I understood "we have...tradition.." at which point I interrupted and said, "I don't speak French". He said OK and pointed to a spot and said, "Stand here." I was in between the pastor's wife and the pastor. We were a receiving line. The colorful string of Polynesian church-goers gave the traditional French greeting to each of us. A kiss to each cheek. I pressed cheeks with about 40 beautiful complete strangers. Walking home, I could still smell the perfume on my face and feel the burn in my cheeks of having smiled for so long at so many people.

Monday, August 3
Today, Brian woke up able to move much better than since his injury on Friday evening. I've been giving him massages and he's been taking pain pills and muscle relaxers and icing. So we left Teahupoo after a last visit with Vaughan, the single hander cruiser from Hawaii on the dock next to us. Here's Brian's description of his injury written the morning after the incident(Saturday)....
Actually I think Tahiti has gotten the better of me. Several casualties have occurred up to this point including two broken boards, lots of lost skin, then this: I got my behind kicked hard. The big local with the helmet passed on a set wave. Then one of the older Brazilian guys called me into a wave because he could not get in. All seemed perfect, then the bottom dropped out on me and I free fell to the flats. All my momentum was going down, so when I hit the bottom I think I just stopped. I'm not sure what happened, but I think at that point the wave sucked me back up and threw me out. The first to hit reef was my butt. It was a very solid hit, then I felt my left booty getting ripped off and my heel ripping across the reef. I don't remember coming up, but when I did, I knew I was hurt pretty bad. By the time I made it back out to the lineup I was shaking; like in shock. At first I thought I'd have to paddle for the boat; but I remembered reading a Transworld Surf article of a guy at Teahupoo who hit bottom very hard, then went on to score the wave of the day. I told myself to shake it off and go for another wave. About 15 minutes later I got a small one. I was having a hard time standing up for the ride. The next wave was smaller, and not even a real ride. By this time I was coughing up junk from deep in my lungs that had been knocked loose in the collision. My entire rib cage was aching, as if it had all been jarred to the point of loosening up the connective tissue to the spine and sternum. I was still Coughing, shuttering, and trying to shake off the impact at least 45 minutes after the pounding. Finally a good medium sized set came and I got my third wave. I could hardly get my body into surf stance, so I decided I was going to have to call it a day. As soon as I got to the dingy, the wind was increasing and I was had a hard time just getting in the boat. I dreaded the trip home as the wind had increased to 15 -20 knots, creating half knee high square wind chop that I had to drive straight into for 6-7 kilometers. I banged into it sitting down until I could not take it any more. Next I took the bow line in hand, negotiated my two pieces of broken board from a few days prior that were lodged into the floor of the boat and stood up in order to absorb the shocks. About a half way to Nomad the rain began to fall. Now I was coughing, shuttering, in shock, and cold, furthermore it was getting dark. The last half of the way I had to sit down, reduce speed a bit, and tack up the lagoon to the point that obscured marina Teahupoo. After getting aboard I made myself take a warm shower, dress the reef rash on my foot and leg and put on some warm pajamas.
My neck is whip lashed to the max. That is the most painful part of it all. I have been using a big fleece blanket wound around my neck as a neck brace. I wish I had one of the braces people use after a car accident. All of my ribs are sore where they connect to the spine, and the muscles are tweaked on my right side. When I take deep breaths I hear the ribs and spine cracking and adjusting, over and over. The right side of my butt has one solid inch of circumference added to it. Megan has been monitoring it's size and color, waiting for the bruising to start. She says it is like I have a water balloon implanted underneath the skin. I can't even look at my toes, so its hard for me to know exactly how big it looks, but she seems very impressed. (I am!) This is the biggest hit I've every taken surfing by a long shot.

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